All the Arts, All the Time

Culture Watch: A big week for high-profile architecture talks

March 2, 2011 | 6:30
am

Three highly acclaimed architects will be giving talks in Los Angeles within the next week, at three separate venues. Steven Holl, architect of the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, Finland, and a luminous addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., among a long list of other projects, will appear Wednesday evening at SCI-Arc to give the first Raimund Abraham Memorial Lecture. Abraham, an Austrian émigré architect based for decades in New York, where he got to know Holl, was killed in a car crash last year just hours after delivering a lecture at SCI-Arc.

On Thursday, meanwhile, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will welcome the Danish phenom Bjarke Ingels, whose firm Bjarke Ingels Group -- BIG for short -- has been piling up a number of substantial commissions of late, including a dramatically torquing 600-unit residential complex on West 57th Street in Manhattan. His talk is co-sponsored by the L.A. chapter of the American Institute of Architects and the A+D Architecture and Design Museum.

And on Tuesday, March 8, the supremely talented Japanese architect Tadao Ando will appear at the Hammer Museum for a talk translated by Kulapat Yantrasast of local firm wHY Architecture.